Nick Ahad: Reading the Riot Act over presenter’s snobbery on books

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – no! The Life of Pi – argh! Please, not a Nick Hornby novel? I look at my bookshelves, cheeks flushed, begin to sweat. The shelves are filled with novels that are... (I can barely type it) popular. I can almost hear Sue Perkins’s voice berating me with a self satisfied, smug, sneering: “You don’t actually read that do you?”.

All right, I’m using a little literary licence. I couldn’t care less for Perkins’s opinion. What’s more, having watched the hour-long programme she presented the previous night, The Books We Really Read (alternative titles: The 60 minute Career Suicide of Sue Perkins, or, I’m a Celebrity, Smack me in the Mouth), I have a pretty clear idea of what she would make of my deeply loved book collection.

Almost a week after the programme I still shake with anger when I think about it. The most heinous aspect of The Books We Really Read (very little wasn’t heinous) was that the programme was the highlight of BBC2’s commendable celebration of World Book Night.

A whole evening of television dedicated to the written word: a wonderful idea spoilt by its centrepiece programme and the snobbery of the presenter. Auntie Beeb: if you are going to do your bit to encourage people to read, well done – but don’t hire a presenter whose literary opinion of herself is on such a pedestal that mere mortals are specks on the ground to her.

At one point – and I wish I was making this up for the sake of parody – she cast her withering gaze over a bestsellers stand and said: “This is the sort of stuff people actually buy. My own literary landscape is tough terrain. I want to know why Marian Keyes is in the charts. Why is Nick Hornby popular?” Later she went to a hairdressers’ (habitat of moronic Sophie Kinsella readers) and reached the zenith of her patronising. “My favourite book is Crime and Punishment, which is a big Russian book – about this big,” she told a hairdresser. “There’s not a lot of gags in it.”

Oh Sue, how can we ever thank you for coming down from Mount Pretentious to show us the error of our ways? Those books and authors you snorted at when the programme started – Margaret Atwood, Wolf Hall – we promise never to read again. As an exercise in opening up the world of books, this was as effective as a burning barricade in front of a library.

Any book can be inspiring, moving, life- affirming and we don’t need a moderately successful TV presenter telling us what we should and shouldn’t read.